Roadmap Update 6

Greetings Wizards!

Its been a while since the last roadmap update, so lets take a look at where we are:

All of these features are related. They will all serve the same purpose, and will all use overlapping bits of technology.

Before I go into what they are, lets talk about why they are important, and the problems they solve.

Rift Wizard is meant to be hard. Its right there on the store page: "Rift Wizard is a tough as nails...".

I believe games have to be hard in order to incentivize the player to deeply engage with them. If Rift Wizard is easy, whats the point of all the build options?

As players become very good at Rift Wizard, they tend to win frequently. More frequently than in many of the roguelikes that influenced Rift Wizard, like TOME and DCSS. So much so, that players often stop thinking of the game as hard. This is, I believe, due to the lack of randomness, and the high amount of agency players have. Being able to choose any spell/skill at any time means once you know the best synergies and build orders, you can really exploit them.

High agency isn't going anywhere- its a core tenet of the games design, and what differentiates it from other rogue likes.

But I would like to provide players with the opportunity to face more difficult versions of the game once they begin to master it.

Thus, the challenge system. The challenge system allows the game to be played with additional, well, challenges- challenges which change the rules of the game, challenges where each one might demand that the player rethinks or deepens their understanding of the game's spellbook and mechanics.

At the same time, it won't have any impact on the learning curve for new players, which is something I worry more and more about as we approach full launch.

So after next patch, "New Game" will be expanded into:

• Normal Game

• Archmage Trials

• Weekly Run

• Custom Challenge

Normal Game is what exists currently.

Archmage Trials will be a set of hand curated challenges. For example:

• Trollpath: All enemy monters have the troll regen buff, levels only have 1 exit

• Giantslayer: All enemies have 3x HP

• Thrifty Wizard: All consumables have a max stack limit of 1. At the beginning of the game, 90% of the spells are disabled.

• Wolfer: All spells except wolf are disabled.

• The Wizard Warlords: All levels contain an enemy wizard, all levels contain 2x lair spawns.

These will all have their own completion achievement.

Weekly Run will be a set of challenge modifications plus a fixed level generation seed that all players have access to. The goal here is to allow the community to compare notes and debate solutions to a new situation is every week. For example, one week might be a fire-only 2x hp run with a furnace shrine on one of the realm 4s, the next might be a tiny backpack 1/2 charges run with very few mana potions. Because of the fixed seed, everyone will be playing the same set of levels, so player experiences will be directly comparable.

Lastly, Custom Games will allow players to mix and match whatever challenge modifiers they want. Are you so confident in your wizarding abilities that you can do a 2x monster ice-only trollworld? Give it a try! (And do post your death or win on the discord afterwards, to prove to the world that such a thing is possible). They will also allow the input of a run-seed, so that players can share interesting seeds, or retry failed runs over and over again if they wish. These runs will be ineligible for achievements.

I'm hoping this system gives something really meaty for veteran players to try, and inspires some cool community activities. This system will be the bulk of the work for next patch- I think its going to add much more to the game than anything else I could work on, and I've been wanting to work on it for several months now. Other than this system, there are some UI tweaks I've been working on to make the game a bit more colorful and inviting and less wall-of-texty, and there will of course be balance tuning. I don't expect to add much other content in the next patch, though if the community can come up with something as awesome as arachnomancer again, I might be tempted.

In other news, my life has been full of taxes and other administrative tasks these past few weeks, and progress has been somewhat slow. That said, I've just pushed a build to the beta branch with a rough draft of the aforementioned Archmage Trials system, and some UI changes. It also contains an adjustment to clay hounds, which in retrospect, were severely under-costed and made the Wolfer trial a bit of a no brainer.

Try it out and let me know what you think on the discord or in PM.

-Dylan